of bullets and shrapnel on the dirty white walls of the terminal, and
the burnt'out hull of a Russian T35 battle tank standing in the grass on
the verge of the runway. The' barrel of its turret gun pointed
earthwards, and grass had grown up between the rusted tracks.
The other passengers pushed forward impatiently behind him, jostling him
and jabbering with excitement as they saw friends and relatives waiting
to greet them under the eucalyptus trees that shaded the building. There
was only one vehicle parked out there, a sand-coloured Toyota Land
Cruiser. The roundel on the driver's do6r had at its centre the painted
head of a mountain nyala, with long corkscrew horns, and in a ribbon
below it the title "Wild Chase Safaris'. A white man lounged behind the
wheel.
As Nicholas came down the ladder behind the two women, the driver
slipped out of the truck and strode out on to the strip to meet them. He
was dressed in a faded khaki bush suit, and he was tall and lean and
walked with a spring to his step.
"Fortyish," Nicholas judged his age from the grizzling in his short
beard. "One of the hard men," Nicholas thought.
His ginger hair was cropped short, his eyes were pale killer blue. There
was a puckered white scar that ran across one cheek and up to twist and
deform his nose.
Tessay introduced `Royan to him first, and he made a short, choppy bow
as he shook her hand. "Enchant6, he told her in an execrable French
accent and then looked at Nicholas.
"This is my husband, Alto Boris," Tessay introduced him. "Boris, this is
Alto Nicholas."
"My English is bad," Boris said. "My French is better."
"Not much to choose between them," Nicholas thought, but he smiled
easily and said, "So we will speak French then. Bonjour, Monsieur
Brusilov. I am delighted to make your acquaintance." He offered the
Russian his hand.
Boris's grip was hard - too hard. He was making a contest out of the
greeting, but Nicholas had expected it He knew this type of old, and he
had taken a deep grip so Boris could not crush his fingers. Nicholas
held him without allowing any strain or effort to show on his lazy
smile. Boris was the first to break the handshake, and there was just
the trace of respect in those pale eyes.
"So you have come for a dikdik?" he asked, just short of a sneer. Most
of my clients come for big elephant, or at least for mountain nyala."
"Bit rich for my nerves," Nicholas grinned, "all that big stuff. Dik-dik
will suit me fine."
"Have you ever been down in the gorge?" Boris demanded. His Russian
accent overpowered the French words and made them difficult to follow.
"Sir Nicholas was one of the leaders of the 1976 river expedition,'
Royan intervened sweetly, and Nicholas was amused by her unexpected
intervention. She had picked up the antagonism between them very
quickly, and come to his rescue.
Boris grunted, and turned to his wife. "Have you got all the stores I
ordered?" he demanded.
"Yes, Boris," she answered meekly. "They are all on board the aircraft."
She is afraid of him, Nicholas decided, probably with good reason.
"Let's get loaded up, then. We have a long journey ahead of us."
The two men rode in the front seats of the Toyota, and the women sat
behind them with many of the packages of stores packed in around them.
Good African protocol, Nicholas smiled to himself: men first, women fend
for themselves.
"You don't want to do the tourist run, do you?" Boris made it sound like
a threat.
"The tourist run?"
"The outlet from the lake, and the power station," he explained. "The
Portuguese bridge over the gorge and the point where the Blue Nile
begins," he added. But before they could accept he warned them, "If you
do, we won't get into camp until long -after dark."
"Thanks for the suggestion,) Nicholas told him politely, "but I have
seen it all before."
"Good." Boris made his approval evident. "Let's get out of here."
The road swung away into the west, below the high mountains. This was
the Goiam, the land of the aloof mountaineers. It was well-populated
country, and they passed many tall, thin men along the roadside as they
strode along behind their herds of goats and sheep, with their long
staffs held crossways over their shoulders. Both men and women wore
shammas, woollen shawls, and baggy white jodhpur pants, with their feet
in open sandals.
They were people with proud and handsome features, their hair dressed
out into thick, bushy halos, and their eyes fierce as those of eagles.
Some of the younger women in the villages they passed through were truly
beautiful.
Most of the men were heavily armed. They carried twohanded swords in
chased silver scabbards, and AK-47 assault rifles.
"Makes them feel like big men," Boris chuckled. "Very brave, very
macho."
The huts in the villages were circular walled tukuls, surrounded by
plantations of eucalyptus and spiky-headed sisal.
Bruised purple storm clouds boiled over the high peaks of the Choke and
swept them with squalls of rain. Like silver coins, the huge drops
rattled against the windscreen of the Land Cruiser and turned the road
to a running river of mud under their wheels.
The condition of the road surface was appalling; in places it
deteriorated into a rocky gully which even the four-wheel drive Toyota
could not negotiate, and Boris was forced to make his own track across
the rocky hillside.
Often reduced to walking speed, they were nevertheless tossed about in
their seats as the wheels bounced over the rough terrain.
"These damn blacks don't even think to repair the roads," Boris grunted.
"They are happy to live like animals." None of them replied, but
Nicholas glanced up into the rear-view mirror at the faces of the two
women. They were closed and neutral, hiding any hurt that either of them
might have felt at the remark.
As they went on, the road, bad as it had been originally, became even
worse. From here onwards the soft the fire. The two women sat a little
to one side, talking quietly, and Boris had his feet propped on the low
table as he leaned back in his chair with a glass in one hand.
He indicated the vodka bottle on the table, as Nicholas stepped into the
circle of firelight, "Get yourself a drink Ice in the bucket."
"I prefer a beer," Nicholas told him. "Thirsty drive." Boris shrugged
and bellowed for his camp butler to bring a brown bottle from the
portable gas refrigerator.
"Let me tell you something, a little secret." He grinned at Nicholas as
he poured himself another vodka. "There is no such animal as a striped
dik-dik these days, even if there ever was one. You are wasting your
time and your money."
"Fine," Nicholas agreed mildly. "It's my time and my money."
"Just because some old fart shot one back in the Dark Ages, doesn't mean
you are going to find another now. We could go up into the tea
plantations for elephant. I saw three bulls there only ten days ago. All
with tusks over a hundred pounds a side."
As they argued, the level in Boris's vodka bottle fell like the Nile at
the end of the inundation. When Tessay told them that the meal was
ready, Boris carried the bottle with him; he stumbled on his way to the
table. During the meal his only contribution to the conversation was to
snarl at Tessay.
"The lamb is raw. Why don't you see to it that the cook does it
properly? Damn monkeys, you have to watch everything they do."
"Is your lamb under-cooked, Alto Nicholas?" Tessay asked without looking
at her husband. "I can have them cook it longer."